| >> abusing the copyright laws and the patent laws have been the most significant blockers of technical progress during the last few decades
> Can you give examples? This is a subject so vast that giving examples requires a book-length text. IIRC at least one or two books have actually been written about this, but I am too lazy to search now for their titles. I am more familiar with what happened in cryptography, where many algorithms have begun to be used only after the 20 years or more required for their patents to expire, while as long as patents remained valid, inferior solutions were used, wasting energy and computing time. Regarding copyrights, I know best my own activity, but I am pretty certain that this anecdotal experience is representative for many programmers. During the first decades of computer programming, until the seventies, there have been a lot of discussions about software reuse as the main factor that can improve programming productivity, and about which features of the programming languages and of the available programming tools can increase the amount of reuse, like modularity. However all those discussions were naive, because later the amount of reuse has remained much lower than predicted, but the causes were not technical, but the copyright laws. Open-source programs have become the main weapon against the copyright laws, which enable the reuse of software nowadays. However the value of software reuse has never been understood by the management of many companies. In decades of working as a programmer, I have wasted a lot of time with writing programs in such a manner so that whoever was my employer could claim the copyright for them. There were plenty of opportunities when I could have used open-source programs, but I could not use them as there was someone who insisted that the product must contain "software IP" owned by the company. Therefore I had to waste time by rewriting something equivalent with what I could have used instantaneously, but different enough to be copyrightable. There were also other cases that were even more annoying, when I had to waste time by rewriting programs that I had already written in the past, but in a different way so that there will be no copyright infringement. Some times the old programs were written when being employed elsewhere, other times they were programs written for myself, during my own time and on my own computers. In such cases, I could not use my own programs, as the employer would then claim copyright on them, so I would lose ownership and I would not be able to use them in the future, for my own needs. There are many projects where I have wasted more time avoiding copyrights than solving problems. I believe that there must be many others who must have had similar experiences. So I welcome the copyright-washing AI coding assistants, which can be employed successfully in such cases in order to avoid the wasteful duplication of work. |
> patents
Patents, unlike copyright, are not automatic. Which indicates that the people who expended their limited lifetime to invent the algorithms explicitly did not want you using them, at least not unless you came to an agreement with them first.
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re rewriting:
There's your real problem. Copyright should belong to the people doing the actual work, not owners/employers who perform no useful work.
If that was the case, the person who did the original work would have no reason to prevent you from using it, as long as he could also benefit from the fruits of your combined labor. For him, the work was already done, it would be extra reward. For you, it would be profitable as long as his reward was less than the cost of you doing it from scratch. You'd most likely meet somewhere in the middle.
Same situation when rewriting your own work.
As often happens, a system was put in place for good. Rich people found a way to exploit it. Now, instead of trying to fix the system, you're arguing to remove it entirely, not realizing you'll be worse off in the end. LLM want to replace all programmers by using their work against them. This is not for your benefit, it's for theirs.
As I often say, what should be protected isn't creativity or expression but work. People should benefit from their work and it should not be used against them. It should also not be possible for someone to benefit without doing useful work.
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Would you work for a company which develops software to detect homosexuals using public cameras and eye tracking? What about a company discovering and selling Android exploits to governments? Does it matter which governments? What about a company which tracks employee movements and productivity to such a level they have to pee in bottles to meet quotas?
The world is full of these examples but at least you had the choice of not helping them. Now you don't.
The people who own them are some of the most anti-social people on the planet and you think they should be able to use our work as they wish...